Category: Reading

In many countries, the proportion of girls opting to pursue careers in lucrative fields such as engineering and computer science has stagnated. Despite the best efforts of schools, universities and governments, women remain underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the so-called “STEM” subjects. The shortage of women is particularly acute in professions with a heavy focus on maths. But why?

A recent study in PNAS suggests that the answer may lie in differences in ability between boys and girls. But surprisingly, the ability in question is not maths, but reading. In a nutshell, girls who are good at maths tend to be even better at reading, and as a result, many turn away from maths and opt instead to pursue careers that utilise their even stronger language skills. By contrast, boys who are good at maths tend not to show this same advantage in reading, making their decision to stick with STEM subjects much more straightforward.

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In an era of TED talks, podcasts, and audiobooks, it’s easy to choose to listen to factual information or fiction, rather than to read it. But is that a good thing? Are there any differences in the way the brain processes the meaning of words that are heard rather than read? According to the researchers behind a thorough new study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the answer to this last question is “no”. But it may still be too soon to conclude that listening to an audiobook is effectively the same as reading it.

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You should take just under two-and-a-half minutes to finish reading this blog post. That’s going by the findings of a new review, which has looked at almost 200 studies of reading rates published over the past century to come up with an overall estimate for how quickly we read. And it turns out that that rate is considerably slower than commonly thought.

Of the various estimates of average reading speed bandied around over the years, one of the most commonly cited is 300 words per minute (wpm). However, a number of findings of slower reading rates challenge that statistic, notes Marc Brysbaert from Ghent University in Belgium in his new paper released as a preprint on PsyArxiv.

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Avid readers of novels know that they often take the perspective of the characters they read about. But just how far does this mental role-playing go? A new paper in the Journal of Memory and Language has provided a clever demonstration of how readily we simulate the thoughts of fictional characters. Borrowing a method from research into the psychology of deliberate forgetting, the researchers at Binghamton University, USA, show that when a story character needs to focus on remembering one series of words rather than another, the reader simulates this same memory process in their own minds. The character’s mental experience becomes the reader’s mental experience.

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Reading with a young child is important for their language development and early literacy skills. But does it matter if you read from an electronic book (e-book) or traditional print? As any parent knows, toddlers are generally keen on screens. So the finding, from a new study in Frontiers in Psychology, that very young children enjoy e-books more than print picture books, may not come as a huge surprise – but these additional findings might: both parents and toddlers behaved differently when reading electronic vs. print picture books. And the toddlers who read the e-books learned more.

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.” So said Joyce Carol Oates, and many more of us suspect that reading good fiction gives us insight into other people.

Past research backs this up, for example providing evidence that people with a long history of reading tend to be better at judging the mental states of others. But this work has always been open to the explanation that sensitive people are drawn to books, rather than books making people more sensitive. However in 2013 a study came along that appeared to change the game: researchers David Kidd and Emanuele Castano showed that exposure to a single passage of literary fiction actually improved readers’ ability to identify other people’s feelings.

Three years ago, a pair of psychologists at the New School for Social Research in New York attracted worldwide interest and controversy when they reported in the prestigious journal Science that reading just a few pages of literary fiction boosted research participants’ recognition of other people’s emotions, but that reading pop fiction (also known as genre fiction) did not. Now the same researchers have returned with a new paper in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts that’s used a different approach to arrive at the same conclusion – again, reading literary fiction, but not genre fiction, appears to be associated with superior emotion recognition skills. Continue reading “More evidence that literary, but not pop, fiction boosts readers’ emotional skills”→

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As you’re reading this blog post silently to yourself, do you hear an inner voice speaking the words in your head? A new paper published in Psychosis suggests that most people do hear an internal voice when they’re reading. But as this is one of the first ever investigations into the question, and it used an unconventional methodology, it’s fair to say the results are far from conclusive.

Ruvanee Vilhauer at New York University took advantage of questions about the phenomenon posted on Yahoo! Answers, the largest English language Q&A website in the world (where people post questions and members of the community chip in with their answers). She found 24 relevant questions posed between 2006 and 2014, and 136 answers in which people described their own experiences when reading.

Vilhauer analysed all the relevant content and looked for recurring themes and insights. Overall, the vast majority (82.5 per cent) of contributors said that they did hear an inner voice when reading to themselves, 10.6 per cent said they didn’t, and the status of the remaining contributors was unclear. Of those who said they heard an inner voice, 13 per cent said they did so only sometimes, with various factors tending to increase the likelihood of this happening, such as their interest in the text.

Among the contributors with an internal reading voice, another key theme was whether or not they only ever heard the same voice (this was true for about half of them) or a range of different voices. For those who heard different inner voices, these tended to vary based on the voice of the character who was speaking in a story, or if it was a text message or email, on the voice of the sender. For people who only ever heard the same internal reading voice, this was usually their own voice, but it was often different in some way from their speaking voice, for example in terms of pitch or emotional tone. Some contributors described or implied that their inner reading voice was just the same as the inner voice they used for thoughts.

Nearly all those who said they had an inner reading voice or voices referred to it being “audible” in some way, for example they spoke of its volume or depth or accent. Another issue that came up was the controllability of the inner reading voice. Some contributors spoke of the voice as distracting or even scary, while others said they deliberately chose the voice they used. You can see why this paper was published in the journal Psychosis. Indeed, Vilhauer said that the insights from her analysis provided some support for theories that say auditory hallucinations are inner voices that are incorrectly identified as not belonging to the self.

Why has this topic been largely overlooked before now (although check out thesestudies from 2011, and Charles Fernyhough’s forthcoming book The Voices Within)? Vilhauer’s study hints at an answer because she found that many people assumed that their inner experiences when reading were shared by everyone. This worked both ways, so some of the people who had an inner reading voice were convinced of its normality: “We all hear our voices in our heads at times – even those of others we know – especially while reading,” said one Yahoo contributor. Yet others who claimed to have no inner voice felt they were the normal ones. For example, in response to a question posted on the site about whether anyone else hears an inner voice while reading, one responder said “Nooo. You should get that checked out” and another wrote, in capitals: “NO, I’M NOT A FREAK”.

Vilhauer speculates that perhaps psychologists have failed to study this question because they’ve simply assumed, like many of the Yahoo contributors, that there’s no variability in this and everyone has the same reading experience as they do.

In the race for eye-catching headlines, this mainstream media coverage arguably missed the more fascinating story of the hunt for cause and effect. Here lead author Dr Stuart Ritchie explains the science:

“Causality, it turns out, is really difficult to prove. Correlational studies, while interesting, don’t give us information about causation one way or another. The randomised controlled trial is the ‘gold standard’ method of telling whether a manipulation has an effect on an outcome. But what if a randomised experiment isn’t possible, for practical or ethical reasons? Thankfully, there is an entire toolkit of study designs that go beyond correlation, and can be used to take steps up the ladder closer to causation.

Say you wanted to find interventions that cause intelligence to increase. Since childhood intelligence test scores are so powerfully predictive of later educational success, as well as health and wealth, it’s of great importance to find out how they might be improved. All sorts of nutritional supplements and training programmes have been tried, but all have failed (so far) to reliably show benefits for IQ. However, one factor that has been convincingly shown to cause improvements in intelligence test scores is education. It wouldn’t exactly be ethical to remove some children from school at random and see how they do in comparison to their educated peers. But in a step up the aforementioned causal ladder, researchers in 2012 used a ‘natural experiment’ in the Norwegian education system (where compulsory years of education were increased in some areas but not others) to show that each year’s worth of extra education added 3.6 IQ points.

What is it about education that’s driving these effects? Could it be that a very basic process like learning to read is causing the improvements in IQ? Keith Stanovich and colleagues showed, in a number of studies in the 1990s, that earlier levels of reading interest (though not ability) were predictive of later levels of verbal intelligence, even after controlling for children’s initial verbal intelligence. In a 1998 review, they concluded that “reading will make [children] smarter”.

On the ladder of causation, a control for pre-existing ability in a non-experimental design is important, but problems remain. For instance, since we know that common genes contribute to reading and intelligence, any study that fails to measure or control for genetic influences can’t rule out that the possibility that the early reading advantage and the later intelligence benefit are due simply to a shared genetic basis that is, say, expressed at different times in different areas of the brain. If only there were a way of cloning children – comparing one “baseline” version of each child against a second version with improved reading ability, and then seeing if the better reading translated to higher intelligence later in development…

This sounds like a far-fetched fantasy experiment. But in a recent study, my colleagues and I did just that, though we left it to nature to do the cloning. Tim Bates, Robert Plomin, and I analysed data from 1,890 pairs of identical twins who were part of the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS). The twins had their reading ability and intelligence tested on multiple measures (averaged into a composite) at ages 7, 9, 10, 12, and 16. For each twin pair at each age, we calculated the difference between one twin and the other on both variables. Since each pair was near-100 per cent identical genetically, and was brought up in the same family, these differences must have been caused purely by the ‘non-shared environment’ (that is, environmental influences experienced by one twin but not the other).

We found that twins who had an advantage over their co-twin on reading at earlier points in their development had higher intelligence test scores later on. Because this analysis controls for initial IQ differences, as well as genetics and socioeconomic circumstances, it is considerably more compelling than previous results that used less well-controlled designs. It’s important to note that we found associations between earlier reading ability and later nonverbal intelligence, as well as later verbal intelligence. So, beyond the not-particularly-surprising finding that being better at reading might help with a child’s vocabulary, we made the pretty-surprising finding that it might also help with a child’s problem solving and reasoning ability. Why?

We now enter the realm of speculation. It might be that reading allows children to practise the skills of assimilating information and abstract thought that are useful when completing IQ tests. The process of training in reading may also help teach children to concentrate on tasks—like IQ tests—that they’re asked to complete. Our research doesn’t shed light on these mechanisms, but we hope future studies will.

One should not give our study a criticism-free ride just because it tells a cheery, ‘good news’ story. A step up toward causation is not causation. Could there have been alternative explanations for our findings? Certainly. It is possible that, for instance, teachers spot a child with a reading advantage and give them additional attention, raising their intelligence ‘without’, as we say in the paper, ‘reading doing the causal “work”‘. It may also have been that our controls were inadequate – as I said above, identical twins are nearly genetically identical, but a small number of unique genetic mutations might occur within each pair. The largest lacuna in our study, though, was the cause of the initial within-pair reading differences. Whether these were caused by teaching, peers, pure luck, or some other process, we couldn’t tell, and it’s of great interest to find out.

We hope that our study encourages researchers in three ways. First, in the eternal quest for intelligence-boosters, instead of looking to flashy new brain-training games or the like, they might wish to examine, and maximise, the potentially IQ-improving effects of ‘everyday’ education. Second, they could attempt to answer the questions raised by our study. Why do identical twins differ in reading, and are the reasons under a teacher’s control? What are the specific mechanisms that might lead from literacy to intelligence? Third, and more generally, we hope it will inspire them to consider new methods, including the twin-differences design, that edge further up the causal ladder, away from the basic correlational study. The data are, of course, far harder to collect, but the stronger inferences found there are well worth the climb.”

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Literary fiction takes the reader on a journey into other worlds, other lives, other minds. A new study shows that this has an immediate effect on the reader’s powers of empathy, as judged by simple lab tests. The same benefit was not found for popular fiction.

“Readers of literary fiction must draw on more flexible interpretative resources to infer the feelings and thoughts of characters,” said the researchers David Kidd and Emanuele Castano at the New School for Social Research. “That is, they must engage Theory of Mind processes [ToM refers to our ability to represent and understand other people’s thoughts and feelings].”

Across five experiments, involving hundreds of volunteers online, the researchers showed that reading a few pages of literary fiction (including works by Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis, Louise Erdrich, Alice Munroe and Dagoberto Gilb) boosted participants’ immediate ability to discern people’s emotions from pictures of their eyes or faces. In some cases, the benefit extended to superior performance on a Theory of Mind picture test that involved using visual or verbal cues to identify what a person was thinking or desiring. No such effects were found after reading non-fiction or pop fiction, including passages from Danielle Steele, Rosamunde Pilcher and Gillian Flynn.

The apparent benefits of reading literary fiction held even after controlling for a raft of other variables, including participants’ education, gender, age and mood.

This isn’t the first study to associate reading fiction with increased empathy. For example, a 2006 paper found that people who knew the names of more novelists (taken as a sign that they read more) tended to excel on lab tests of social awareness and empathy. However, such findings were possibly explained by people with greater empathy choosing to read more. By adopting an experimental design this new study avoids that problem. It also extends previous research by suggesting there is something special about literary fiction.

That the beneficial effects of reading were limited to literary fiction also poses a conundrum since the classification of fiction as literary is not entirely objective. For the present purposes the researchers drew on works that have been awarded or short-listed for literary prizes. The question remains – what is it about literary fiction, but not pop fiction, that improves readers’ ability to recognise other people’s thoughts and feelings? Comparison of the superficial linguistic characteristics of literary and pop fiction largely drew a blank, with the exception of frequency of negative emotion words.

The researchers’ belief is that the active ingredient of literary fiction is the way such books “engage their readers creatively as writers … The absence of a single authorial perspective prompts readers to enter a vibrant discourse with the author and her characters.” However, they conceded that their findings “are only preliminary and much research is needed.”

One weakness of the research is that the effects of reading literary fiction on the cognitive component of Theory of Mind (understanding/identifying another person’s thoughts) were inconsistent and sometimes elusive. No benefits were found for the so-called “false belief” test, which the researchers suggested was due to the task being too easy, such that readers in all conditions excelled. On the other hand, benefits of literary fiction were found for only the easy version of the Yoni task (participants must identify one or more people’s thoughts based on visual and verbal clues). The harder Yoni trials “may require a set of more advanced cognitive skills … that are less easily influenced,” the researchers said.

Another potential problem with the study is the way the texts were presented. It’s not clear if the identity of the passages was hidden or guessed, and related to that, we don’t know if participants developed expectations that their empathy skills would be improved after reading a piece of literary prose. Such expectations could have played a role in the observed effects.

Nonetheless, if replicated and elucidated in further research, there could be important educational and cultural implications to arise from these new findings, especially at a time when many policy-makers are calling for less emphasis on fiction in secondary education. For now however we’re a long way from knowing exactly what aspects of Theory of Mind benefit from reading literary fiction and why. It’s also not yet established how long the benefits last, and whether the effects of reading short passages (as in this study) is any different from the experience of reading an entire novel.